The Big Exit (3 page)

McGregor was twenty-nine when Madden first encountered him eight years ago, a programmer turned entrepreneur who later got
a big payout when his online-payments company was swallowed up by an enterprise firm. He vividly remembers McGregor sitting
there on the grassy embankment by the side of the road, his head in hands, muttering to himself, still in shock after the
vehicle he was in ran a red light and T-boned another vehicle, killing a young woman driver and badly injuring her friend
and coworker. McGregor was the passenger in the vehicle that caused the accident. However, the following day McGregor’s friend,
Richie Forman, insisted he wasn’t driving, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Thus began the saga of the Bachelor Disaster,
which would play out over the following thirteen months and end with a jury siding with McGregor.

Looking at the guy now it’s hard to tell how the years between had treated him. Judging from the minivilla on at least an
acre, the Rolex on his wrist, and the three high-performance German cars a few feet away, he seems to have been doing just
fine—financially anyway. Beyond the mortal wounds, his body shows some signs of more mundane wear and tear; his slicked-back
hair is flecked on the sides with gray and has receded an inch or so. He seems heavier, too. Not fat, but his face, the part
that isn’t smashed in anyway, seems fuller and his body thicker than Madden remembers.

“Bit of a mixed message, don’t you think?” Lee says, turning his lens on a wallet that’s lying several feet away from the
body, splayed open with a couple of credit cards half out of their slots. Not far from the wallet, someone has scrawled a
single word on the garage floor using what appeared to be the victim’s blood:
HACK
.

“On the one hand,” Lee goes on, “our killer made a halfhearted attempt to make it look like a robbery gone awry. On the other,
we have what appears to be the word ‘Hack’ written on the ground near the victim. That would seem to put the crime in a new
context. Of course, ‘hack’ could mean a few things, couldn’t it?”

Madden takes a step forward and goes down to one knee, keeping his back straight as he descends. If he’s not careful, sometimes
his lower back locks up with spasms. A visit to an orthopedic surgeon and an MRI machine had revealed two bulging discs and
some stenosis, which apparently was pretty typical for “someone your age.”

“Don’t forget the watch,” he tells Lee. “Billings says it’s a Rolex Daytona. A collector’s item. Fifteen grand easy.”

“First thing I’d take,” Lee agrees.

He’s a small guy who wears his hair in a crew cut and has a diamond stud in his left ear. He and Madden went to the same high
school, Woodside—or Weedside, as locals sometimes called it, deferring to the 1970s nickname. Lee, in his late thirties, like
Billings, graduated twenty-five years after Madden.

“Rolex never did nothin’ for me,” Ramirez remarks as if Rolex were a perpetually broke ex-boyfriend who had erectile dysfunction.

Earlier there hadn’t been much light in the garage, but Lyons’s team has set up a couple of portable forensic light source
units with multiple blue-and-white LEDs in them so the area is brighter. Depending on what color filter you use, the lights
are designed to reveal certain types of trace evidence, everything from hair and fibers to finger-and footprints to bodily
fluids.

Madden checks out the watch again. It’s got a black face and stainless-steel dial and band. An attractive watch, but Madden
has no idea what makes it special.

“His hands looked okay to me,” he says, referring to the victim. “I didn’t see any defensive wounds.”

“I don’t think the guy ever knew what hit him,” Lyons says. “I think he must have turned around and
wham
, that was it. Could have gotten something out of the Porsche there and then got jumped.”

“Weapon?” he asks.

Lyons: “You got about a five-inch gash there. Looks like the killer came
almost straight down. So I gotta say hatchet—or something like it. But the wounds to the face were made with a blunt object.”

“I was thinking the same thing.”

Lyons says that a cursory analysis of the bloodstain pattern—the most noticeable streak at least—suggests the guy was hit
mostly from the front, and the killer, if he had to guess now, was probably right-handed because more of the wounds were on
the victim’s left side. Madden knows that once they complete all their measurements, photos, sketches, and sophisticated computer
analysis, they’ll have a pretty precise picture of exactly how McGregor bought it. They’ll definitively be able to determine
if he was struck by a right- or left-handed person and approximately how tall that person is.

Madden turns his attention to McGregor’s pants pockets. The one closest to him—the left pocket—doesn’t seem to have anything
bulging out the side but it’s hard to tell if anything is inside.

“You find his cell phone yet?”

“Yeah. Chin’s back at the truck working on it. Android model. Password protected. Should have something for you shortly.”

Not too long ago, if you found a cell phone at a crime scene, there wasn’t much you could do with it. You were supposed to
take pictures of where it was found, but after that, you really weren’t supposed to mess with it. If the thing was on and
not locked, you could take a look at what was on the home screen, but if you started pressing buttons and accidentally ended
up deleting something, you could potentially make everything inadmissible in court. Any information from the phone was evidence
that had to be handled properly, which meant sending it over to the forensics lab and having them do the extraction and burn
all the data to disc. At best, it could take several hours; at worst, several days.

Recently, however, the coroner’s office came up with the dough for a mobile field toolkit that included a laptop, some really
expensive software, and a whole bunch of connectors that fit just about any cell phone, PDA, or tablet out there.

“Got something else you might find interesting,” Lyons says.

Madden stands up, ascending cautiously. He watches as Lyons pulls out a clear plastic evidence bag from his coat pocket. Inside,
he sees a small gold-colored rectangular object that he thinks for a
moment is a fancy USB thumb drive—but it looks bigger than a thumb drive.

“Ramirez found it on the ground just outside the garage,” Lyons said, handing the bag to him. “There’s an inscription on it.
Lifted a couple of pretty good prints from it. Going to run them shortly.”

Nearsighted, Madden raises his glasses, propping them up on top of his head. Then, holding the bag by the top and letting
the object dangle there in front of him, he takes a closer look at what he now realizes is an old-school cigarette lighter.
On the side facing him, there’s a stamp in raised gold cursive letters that reads, “Thanks, Sinatra.” The last name appears
to be Frank Sinatra’s signature.

“Inscription’s on the other side,” Lyons says.

Madden flips the bag around. The inscription is an actual engraving etched into the lighter in tiny letters. With the reflection
of the light and the plastic, he’s having trouble making out the words.

“You know where that’s from?” Lyons asks.

When Madden doesn’t answer right away, Lyons starts humming a few bars, mixing in the lyrics, to give him a clue.

Your love for me has got to be real. For you know just how I feel
…

“Buddy Holly did it first,” he says. “Nineteen fifty-seven. But the Stones did it better. Their first hit in the U.S. The
Dead covered it, too. Heard it many a time. ‘Not Fade Away.’”

Just then Madden finally realizes what he’s looking at, the words coming into focus.

To Richie: Love is love and not fade away, xoxo, Hills

His eyes open wide. “I’ll be damned.”

Lyons: “That’s what I thought. Gotta be him, right? Mr. Bachelor Disaster. Any idea where he is and what he’s been up to?”

Madden shakes his head, a little dazed.

“No idea,” he says, handing the bag back. “But I’m sure as hell going to find out.”

R
ICHIE’S FIRST DAY AT THE
E
XONERATION
F
OUNDATION
, L
OURDES
Hinojosa started Richie out on the mail. Thanks to being down a person, they were behind a good two weeks and an intimidating
stack of letters had piled up inside a large box that was tucked under a desk and doing an awfully good impression of a waste
bin.

Hinojosa told him what he already knew: the foundation had strict guidelines for taking on cases and the vast majority of
the submissions it received didn’t meet the criteria, much less follow the submission guidelines. Defendants or their representatives
were supposed to submit a brief, factual summary of the case along with a list of evidence used against the defendant. “No
other documents should be submitted for initial review,” the foundation’s website stated. It also made clear that it only
accepted cases on post-conviction appeal in which DNA evidence could prove innocence. No email inquiries, no telephone calls.
Other agencies could provide broader legal support. See links below, thank you very much.

“Brief” and “factual” seemed to be the most challenging concepts for prisoners. Richie had read Nathaniel West’s
Miss Lonelyhearts
in college, and too many of the letters in the pile were veritable tales of woe that had nothing to do with innocence but
instead expressed a more profound form of victimization that was often accompanied by a rant—sometimes a rather eloquent one—against
broader societal injustices and inequities. Beyond help, or even sympathy, what they seemed to crave was credit for their
pitiable histories. “What can I
get for this?” was the con’s mentality. “What you gonna gimme?” It had to be worth something. It had to have some trade-in
value.

Hinojosa told Richie that sifting through the correspondence pile was like panning for gold in a stream that had been panned
out years ago. You got a little dust, some flakes here and there, but the nuggets were few and far between. DNA evidence had
been introduced to the legal system in 1989 and now, more then twenty years later, the Exoneration Foundation and other organizations
like it had managed to identify many of the legacy cases in California where DNA might be a factor in proving a defendant’s
innocence. That didn’t mean there weren’t some still out there—and many they still were working on. But the majority of new
cases they took on were typically from the last two to five years.

At around ten he was introduced to a young woman named Ashley Gordon, the second case assistant, who sat down at a desk on
the other side of the small room. Petite, with fine, straight dark hair, she was dressed in jeans and a gray Gap hooded sweatshirt
and wore nerdy, thick black-rimmed glasses—probably for effect, he guessed. She seemed friendly enough. But she promptly turned
her chair away from his, put on a pair of headphones, pulled her hood over her head, and went to work on her computer. As
he read and sorted, her back to his, he could hear the faint din of her music leaking out through her earbuds.

Some time had passed, when he heard a crunching noise. He turned around and saw a Ziploc bag with baby carrots sitting on
the desk next to Ashley’s keyboard, and Ashley pondering her computer screen with a half-eaten carrot in her hand. She took
another bite and the mini carrot was gone. The sound of her chewing reverberated through the empty room like a trash compactor.
When she went to reload, she noticed he was looking at her.

“Oh, sorry,” she said, lowering her hood and tugging the ‘buds from her ears. “How impolite. Want one?”

“No. Thanks.”

“You sure?”

He nodded, wishing he’d brought his own headphones.

“How’s the correspondence?” she asked before he could turn back around.

“Fine. I think it’s been breeding in the box.”

“Ha, funny. I suppose it’s what you expected. I’ll tell you something, though. We had an intern here last year who used to
read them and get shocked. Most of the letters are pretty earnest, right? But every so often you get one that’s really dirty.
And this girl—she was still in high school—would open one up and there’d be some guy talking about how he was imagining her
reading his letter and masturbating as he was writing it. It got pretty graphic. Of course, he didn’t know she’d be reading
it, but if you send letters to enough people, you eventually hit on the person you’re imagining, right? It’s like an odds
thing.”

He stared at her, slightly dumbfounded. She herself didn’t seem much removed from high school.

“What’s up with the hoodie?” he asked. “You in training for the World Series of Poker or something?”

He had a feeling the reference might go over her head—and it did. Or at least she let it blow right past her.

“Oh no,” she said, “I just didn’t want my music to bother you. I know I leak.”

She shifted a little in her chair, allowing him to get a glimpse of her screen. He felt his stomach drop, for there was a
blog post about Mark McGregor’s new company, with a shot of him reclined in a modern, high-backed office chair, smiling with
despicable confidence. The site, OneDumbIdea.com, covered start-ups. It was run by Tom Bender, a pompous but audaciously talented asshole Richie had met a couple of times
at networking events. That was back in the day when Bender’s site was in its fledgling state and nobody thought too much of
it. Now the bastard had apparently become the gossip arbiter of all things Valley.

“What are you working on?” he asked testily.

“Background check.”

“On who?”

“You.”

If it was a joke, he didn’t think it was funny.

“Kidding,” she said. “Well, sort of anyway. Lourdes wanted me to check on a few things. She likes you.”

“What’d she say?”

“She didn’t say anything. I can just tell.”

“Do you have any say in the hiring process?”

“I should think so. I do good work. They value my opinion.”

“I had a bad feeling you were going to say that.”

She smiled, looking at him more closely.
Why did she think everything he said was amusing
?

“Okay, I see it more now,” she announced after a moment.

“See what?”

“The Frank connection. I see how you can pull it off.”

“The hat and suit get me sixty percent of the way there.”

“And the rest?”

“Attitude.”

“Me, too,” she said.

“I see that.”

“Well, you’ve got the eyes. The color anyway.”

“She really have you backgrounding me?” He knew they’d be combing through his history, but it seemed oddly insulting to do
it right in front of him.

“Don’t take it personally. They did it for me, too. They do it for everybody.”

“You look clean.”

“Pretty much,” she said. “When I was sixteen, I had an open-container violation. And a cop once ticketed me for not having
my headlights on as I was leaving a lighted shopping-mall parking lot at night. That’s the extent of my run-ins with the law.
Kinda pathetic, right?”

“Where was sixteen?”

She cocked her head a little, not quite understanding him. “Oh, that’s an odd way to put it.” Mulling it over, she seemed
to approve of the phrasing. “Sixteen was Danville,” she said. “Eighteen was UC Irvine. Twenty-four is now. Bad time to find
a job. Half my friends are unemployed or teaching English in Costa Rica. I was lucky. I wanted to be an investigative reporter.
Had an internship for a couple of summers at a lefty blog where they were focused on old-fashioned muckraking. But they didn’t
have any paying positions. At least this pays and I’ve trained under a couple of really great investigators. Same skill set,
just no articles. You know, we already have forty applications for this shitty little open position.”

“Try making license plates for thirty-eight cents an hour. It won’t seem so shitty.”

“Sorry,” she said, momentarily chastised. “I didn’t mean for it to come out like that. I don’t mean to be flip or anything.
I’m not a flip person.”

She fell silent after that. A little while later he went to the bathroom. When he came back and sat down, she asked him whether
he’d ever sent in a submission.

He made a slow swivel in his chair to face her.

“Maybe.”

“You did, didn’t you?”

He shrugged. “I was a poor candidate. White, good legal representation, and my sentence wasn’t supposed to be all that long.
I was looking at two years with good behavior. By the time they got something going, if they got something going, I’d be out
already. That’s what you tell half these people, don’t you?”

“But sometimes Marty takes on higher-profile cases.”

Marty
. That made him smile. He liked how Lowenstein was on a first-name basis with everybody. A real man of the people.

“Marty goes low and high, not
higher
,” he said. “And when he goes high, he gets in on the ground floor.”

She didn’t seem to hear his response. Her eyes had settled on something behind him.

“That lighter,” she said, nodding at his lighter sitting on the desk next to his cell phone. “It’s got Sinatra’s signature.
Where’d you get it?”

He wasn’t sure how she could have seen the signature from where she was sitting. It was pretty small. He guessed she must
have looked at it while he was in the bathroom. For someone who seemed awfully introverted at first, she was turning out to
be surprisingly inquisitive. He wondered if she’d looked at the inscription on the other side of the lighter. Chances were
she hadn’t, because he’d have noticed if she’d moved it even a fraction of an inch. If there was one gift prison had given
him besides a better physique, it was a keen sense of object memory. Locked up in cramped quarters, you could end up being
very anal about your possessions. You were always taking stock of what you had, where it was, who wanted what, and how those
things might help you avert conflict and survive better.

“Sinatra used to give them out as thank-you gifts,” he said. “You can find them for sale on the Internet.”

“How much?”

“Not that much. A few hundred bucks.”

“You think it’s real?”

“Probably. But it’s a bullshit little trinket. He gave away lots of them. To get one he actually used, his own personal lighter,
that’s a different story.”

“How would you know he really used it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe we could get Marty on it for some DNA certification. He could start a little side business to help raise
money to get all these poor schmucks out of the can.”

She let out a little laugh. “You seem a little cynical for someone who’s supposed to be idealistic.”

“Who said anything about being idealistic?”

“Why are you here then?”

“Same reason that innocent high-school intern was here,” he said. “Looks good on the résumé.”

“I doubt that.”

“Which part?”

“Why do you have a lighter if you don’t smoke?”

“How do you know I don’t smoke?”

“You have decent skin, no yellow fingernails or teeth, and you don’t smell like a chimney. Deduction: you don’t smoke.”

“It’s my comfort object,” he said, not totally joking. “I also have a serious fake smoking habit. Part of the act. What’s
nice is you get all the benefits of smoking without smoking.”

“I think I heard that in a Nicorette commercial. You fake drink, too?”

“No, there I inhale.”

“Even after what you went through with the accident?”

“I gave up driving instead.”

“You don’t have a car?”

“Or a license.”

“That guy who was in the car with you … your friend who you said switched places.”

“What about him?”

“You ever talk to him?”

“No. Why would I talk to him?”

“I don’t know. What happened to him?”

“Whatever your search engine says happened. I assume you’re quite proficient with Google.”

She was.

“Well, what does it say?”

“It seems like he made out pretty well.”

“Better than well. Like a bandit, wouldn’t you say?”

She nodded. At that moment Mark McGregor was very much alive and well, and according to the article, launching a new company.
The headline said something about a “private beta,” a euphemism for a small group trial.

“There you go,” he said. “Google’s your friend. Remember that.”

The room fell silent. At this rate, he thought, you won’t last two days, Richie. Keep it up.

“Look,” he said, “it’s not something I particularly relish talking about. You know that
Guys and Dolls
song, ‘Luck Be a Lady’?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, there’s a line in it, ‘A lady doesn’t wander all over the room and blow on some other guy’s dice.’ You know that line?”

“No, but it sounds kinky.”

“Well, every time I sing it I have this picture of this dame, you know this femme fatale sort of dame, who comes over and
blows on my dice. When you blow on dice, it’s supposed to be for luck, right? Well, my dice got blown on that night and the
exact opposite happened. I crapped out. Bad. Simple as that.”

“Rick?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you mind if I look into your case a bit?”

“Why? What’s the point?”

“I don’t know. To stop you from reciting cheesy lines from old Sinatra show tunes and talking about some chick blowing on
your dice.”

“When you say it like that, it does sound kinky.”

“Told you,” she said.